What worked for the most charming people in history

43 BC – AD 17

Publius Ovidius Naso was born on 20 March 43 BC in Sulmo, in the mountains east of Rome. He became the most famous poet in Rome and wrote the Metamorphoses, which people still read. In AD 2 he published Ars Amatoria, The Art of Love. It is a handbook in three parts: how to find someone, how to keep them, and in part three the same advice written for women. Six years later the emperor Augustus sent him into exile in Tomis, a town on the Black Sea at the edge of the empire. He spent the rest of his life there, writing letters home and asking to return. He was never allowed back. He died in AD 17 or 18. He said he was exiled for “a poem and a mistake”, and he never said which poem or what mistake.

Why we chose them · our reading

We chose him because he wrote the first book on the subject. Every later book is arguing with his handbook from AD 2, usually without saying so. Our own front page says the material runs from “Ovid to Casanova”, so we could not leave him out. He is also the best reason to read these people carefully and not simply copy them. Some of his advice is truly useful and some of it cannot be defended, and both are in the same chapter.

c. 69 – 30 BC

She was the last active ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, and the last of a Macedonian Greek family that had held the throne for nearly three hundred years. She came to power at about eighteen. Her brother's court removed her, and she took the country back with a Roman army behind her. She is reported to have spoken several languages, including Egyptian, which was unusual in her family. She governed a rich country with plenty of grain for twenty-one years while Rome fought itself. She died in 30 BC, a few days after Antony, as Octavian took Alexandria.

Why we chose them · our reading

Everyone knows the story of her ship, and the ship is the least interesting thing about her. She had studied Roman politics for years before she staged that arrival. The show worked because the preparation was already done. We chose her as the argument against treating appearance as the skill.

1620 – 1705

She was a French writer, musician and courtesan who ran one of the most important salons in seventeenth-century Paris. Her father played the lute and taught her to sing and play. She retired as a courtesan in 1671. After that, her gatherings became both fashionable and respectable, and they attracted Molière, Scarron and Saint-Évremond. She refused money from her lovers and kept her independence in a century that gave women very little. In her will she left money for books for the young Voltaire, whose father managed her affairs late in her life. Sources disagree about her year of birth. 1620 is given most often, and 1623 also appears.

Why we chose them · our reading

She is the only person in this course for whom we have a record of ending relationships well. A writer of her time recorded that no man dared resent the man who replaced him. Almost every book about attraction stops at the beginning. We chose her for what comes after.

1725 – 1798

He was a Venetian writer and adventurer. In a long and unsettled life he was a student priest, a soldier, a violinist, a spy, a gambler, a fraudster and finally a castle librarian in Bohemia. He escaped from the Doge's prison in 1756, and he retold that story for the rest of his life. In his sixties a doctor advised him to write as a cure for low spirits, and he wrote Histoire de ma vie, about 3,700 pages. That book is the reason he is remembered as a lover and not as any of the other things he was.

Why we chose them · our reading

The memoir is a better book than his reputation suggests, and the reputation misunderstands how he did it. The pages do not show conquest. They show a huge interest in other people. He asked questions, he enjoyed things easily, and he left before he was unwelcome. That is a skill, and it can be taught. His habit of escaping responsibility cannot.

1721 – 1764

She was born Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, the daughter of a Paris financier, with no family claim to a place at the French court. She met Louis XV in 1745, moved into Versailles within months, and was made Marquise de Pompadour the same year. The physical relationship ended around 1750. She remained his closest companion and unofficial adviser for another fourteen years. She ordered new buildings, supported Voltaire and the Encyclopédie, and shaped the taste of the court until she died in 1764.

Why we chose them · our reading

She kept the attention of a famously bored king for nineteen years, and only five of those years involved sleeping with him. Desire did not hold the other fourteen. We chose her to show that being interesting lasts longer than being wanted.

1788 – 1824

He was a British Romantic poet who became famous overnight in 1812, when the first part of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage was published. His fame was of a modern kind: crowds followed him, people gossiped about him, and his image was sold. Within four years it collapsed under scandal and debt, and he left England for good. He died at thirty-six at Missolonghi, where he had gone to fight in the Greek war of independence.

Why we chose them · our reading

He is our warning example, and this course needs one. Every seduction manual copies his image, the unavailable, dangerous, brooding man, and quietly leaves out the damage around him. He is not here to be copied. He is here so that you can see that image together with its results.

1863 – 1938

He was an Italian poet, novelist and playwright who became one of the most famous writers in Europe, and then one of its strangest political figures. He had a long and public affair with Eleonora Duse, the most famous actress of the time, and he wrote his best plays during it. Sources place its end between 1904 and 1910. In 1919 he took the city of Fiume with a private army and ruled it for fifteen months. Wikipedia states history's judgement plainly: he is "credited with partially inventing Italian fascism", and he has been called "the John the Baptist of Italian fascism" because Mussolini copied his rituals.

Why we chose them · our reading

He is the strongest evidence we have that attention matters more than looks. He was short and balding, and people of his time found him ordinary to look at. He was still the most pursued man in Italy. He is also where the method turns harmful: he published his lover's private life as a novel while the affair was still going on. Preparing in order to understand someone is attention. The same preparation done in order to control them is a trick.

1869 – 1916

He was a Siberian peasant. After a pilgrimage and a religious conversion in 1897, he travelled as a strannik, a religious wanderer, and reached the imperial court. He held no position in the Russian Orthodox Church. His standing depended almost entirely on the haemophilia of the Tsarevich Alexei and the Empress's belief that he could help. His calm seemed to steady the household. Conservative nobles murdered him at the Yusupov Palace in December 1916. Douglas Smith's 2016 biography argues that his political influence was much smaller than the legend says, and that the rumours did far more damage than the man.

Why we chose them · our reading

He shows most clearly that certainty spreads to other people, and he is the clearest warning about how little that certainty is worth. He offered an isolated family complete conviction and his full attention, and nobody else at court offered either. People took his confidence for ability. They were wrong, and they did it anyway. This explains his hold on them. It also explains why another person's certainty is not evidence of anything.

1926 – 1962

She was born Norma Jeane Mortenson. She was an American actress who became the most photographed woman of her century, and one of its most underestimated performers. She fought her studio for better parts and better pay, started her own production company in 1955, and studied at the Actors Studio in New York. She read seriously and she wrote. Her notes and poems were published in 2010 as Fragments. She died in 1962, aged thirty-six.

Why we chose them · our reading

We chose her because of one story that teaches more than any theory. Susan Strasberg described walking through Manhattan beside her while nobody recognised her, until she asked: "Do you want to see me be her?" Nothing changed that a camera could have shown, and a crowd gathered. She could switch her presence on. If she could switch it on, she had built it, and if she built it, you can learn it.

1906 – 1975

She was born Freda Josephine McDonald in St. Louis. She arrived in Paris at nineteen and became the highest-paid entertainer in Europe. She gave up her US citizenship and became French in 1937. During the Second World War she worked for French military intelligence. She carried information written in invisible ink on sheet music, and she sheltered refugees at her château. She received the Resistance Medal and the Croix de Guerre, and she was made a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur. She spoke at the 1963 March on Washington. In 2021 she was honoured at the Panthéon, the first Black woman to be. The coffin placed there holds soil from places where she lived. Her body remains in Monaco.

Why we chose them · our reading

On her first night in Paris, she was given material built on someone else's racist fantasy. She made it her own by refusing to play it seriously. She crossed her eyes, puffed out her cheeks, and was funny where the script wanted her to be exotic. Being playful worked better than being polished, in front of the hardest possible audience. The warning about her matters more than any other on this page: undermining that racist idea was a way to survive before it was charm.